


Convene

by ViziVoir



Series: CU Redemption AUs [2]
Category: Captain Underpants Series - Dav Pilkey
Genre: AU, Aliens, Redemption, Slow Burn, more like mixed canons lol, tags to be updated
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-26
Updated: 2018-07-26
Packaged: 2019-06-16 12:33:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,994
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15437136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ViziVoir/pseuds/ViziVoir
Summary: The Melvin Sneedly redemption AU we all deserve.Sequel to Coexist, though reading that isn't mandatory. Same deal - short chapters, frequent updates, maaaybe another robot fight? Who knows!





	1. Chapter 1

How do you define the end of the world?

For resident troublemakers George Beard and Harold Hutchins, the end of the world conjured up images like fireballs raining down and hordes of zombies roaming the streets in search of brains. For resident tattletale Melvin Sneedly, it meant not getting an A on a test, or a teacher saying that he did a good job, not a great job, on an assignment. For principal and habitual curmudgeon Benjamin Krupp, it meant not having to deal with George and Harold's shenanigans, or maybe the educational system getting decent funding, for once.

And for definitely human lunch lady Edith Star, it looked a lot like the transmission she'd just received from a trio of aliens.

She paced around the main room of her spaceship-turned-residence, tucked deep in the woods just outside of Piqua, Ohio. At least, it was comparable to pacing; her tentacles writhed nervously as she moved, coiling around themselves while she tried to figure out how to deal with her sisters.

...Actually, wait. Before I can tell you about that character, I have to tell you about this character.

Let's talk about Melvin Sneedly.

After all, who wouldn't want to talk about him? He'd co-authored multiple scientific articles in the field of theoretical physics, he spearheaded the creation of an indestructible cyborg hamster, he reads and writes at a college post-graduate level, and all while still slogging through elementary school!

Yes, any way you slice it, Melvin was destined to shape history. Melvin was a prodigy, unrivaled among people both his age and older. Melvin was the greatest.

Except just about no one seemed to get that. His classmates - he wouldn't call them his "peers", not on his life - resented him because they were jealous of his talents. His teachers liked him well enough because he had respect for the rules and organizational hierarchy, but as soon as his ambitions eclipsed what was considered proper classroom conduct, they would turn on him. And his parents were the ones making him go through grade school in the first place!

In fact, the only two people who treated him like the incredibly intelligent person he was turned out to both be supervillains.

If you think that fact would've made him re-evaluate his worldview by now, you'd be drastically overestimating how smart Melvin Sneedly really is.

Now, it just so happened that one of Melvin's hobbies was perusing pop science outlets, usually whenever he wanted a laugh at the expense of the scientifically illiterate. He saw an article claiming an experiment had conclusive results, when their p-values had been in the range of 0.1. Zero-point-one! If that wasn't hilarious, he didn't know what was.

One of his usual haunts, Science4U (Melvin was led to believe the "U" referred to "imbeciles") posted a story about an extremely unusual cosmic signal detected from somewhere in the neighborhood of Uranus. He initially dismissed it as the usual pandering to alien believers, but surprisingly, the snippet of raw data they showed seemed to be more than simply random noise from a dying star. At first glance, it wasn't much but pretty, but Melvin recognized good data when he saw it.

He found the DOI of the entire data set and immediately became hooked on decoding it. There was some kind of pattern in the signal, he was sure of it, and his analytical mind latched onto the puzzle like a baby opossum latches onto its mother.

For a solid two weeks his life was devoted to developing a program to decode the seemingly random noise. He basically lived off of ramen and rice cereal. During class, he answered teachers' questions impatiently rather than excitedly, anxious to get back to burying his head in books about audio encoding and radio waves.

He overheard George and Harold talking about him at lunch, but he didn't even have the time or motivation to continue his endless crusade against their immature, irresponsible idiocy. Once Melvin got focused on something, he stayed focused.

At the end of two weeks, he'd resolved the signal into something nearly resembling a voice. It only took a few more days before it became comprehensible - grainy, and littered with random clicks and odd squelching, but comprehensible nonetheless.

"...So Eerith is what they call the planet? Erith? Earth?"

Melvin's heart practically leapt out of his chest.

Aliens.

"Ugh. Using human speech patterns feels so... bad." Another voice chimed in to the broadcast. There was a pause.

"I'm sure you did your best to gather the data," a third voice contributed. "It's just that your best is terrible." So they had to have a contact on Earth, surmised Melvin. How long had this been going on?

"Even with how dismal your efforts are, I grow tired of waiting," continued the third speaker. "This will have to suffice."

"So we're going to Earth now? As in, now-now? I didn't even finish curling my tentacles!" whined the first alien.

"No one cares about your beauty regime," snapped the second.

"Enough." Melvin inferred that the third alien to speak was their de facto leader. "We're going to Earth. There will be a period of observation, as per our usual agenda, and then we strike."

Another pause, during which Melvin's mind raced with this new information. Who could he alert - the police? The president? Who would believe him? The way he'd decoded the information required knowledge of eight different subdisciplines, and even then it wasn't completely obvious. Maybe someone else could worry about this. Surely somebody, at least one person somewhere out there had managed to decode the signal, and surely the aliens weren't all landing in...

"No, we aren't going to wait for more intel. Where did you say you were stationed? A division called Piqua?"

Melvin's jaw dropped. He was too shocked to be embarrassed about how dumb that made him look.

"You've done an almost passable job, Xyrx. ...No, we aren't going to call you Edith. That's absurd. Await our arrival in four time cycles."

In the back of his mind, Melvin registered that the name Edith was vaguely familiar. Most of his mental faculty, though, was devoted to staggering out of his room and down the stairs, into the kitchen where his mother was hunched over a Bunsen burner.

"Mom. Mom!" His voice grew from an uncharacteristic whimper into a shout. "They're coming."

Sparks flew from Mrs. Sneedly's project. "Not now, son. I'm making... toast!"

At a loss for what to do, Melvin waited the few seconds for his mother's bread to reach the perfect degree of crispiness. After it did, she shoved her lab goggles up onto her forehead, revealing the marks they'd left on her face. "Now what's this about someone coming? If they're someone from school, make sure they've completed all the required training before they come over. We don't want another repeat of the Jeremy incident." She took a decisive bite out of her toast.

"No. Listen to me, it's aliens," Melvin said gravely, trying to communicate the seriousness of the situation.

He didn't meet with much success, as his mother just frowned and felt his forehead. "Are you feeling okay? You haven't been spending too much time around those non-scientists, have you? We're still not going to homeschool you, so divest yourself of that notion at once if this is some sort of ploy."

"No, it's nothing as facetious as that! I can show you the signal..."

"Ah, yes, the 'signal' from the 'aliens'." She used air quotes with the hand that wasn't holding toast.

"This is real! They're going to land on Earth, and they're coming to Piqua!"

"Of course. Of all the places, they just so happened to choose a small town in Ohio."

"Yes, and..." Melvin stopped. "You're not going to believe me."

His mother shook her head and took a bite out of her toast. "And what's more, my lunch break is over. Good talk, son. Stop thinking about inane garbage."

Melvin fumed as she walked away in the direction of her private lab. If he couldn't even get his mother, one of the most rational people he knew, to give him the time of day... well. It was obvious he was going to have to take things into his own hands.


	2. Chapter 2

From that moment forward, any new arrivals in Piqua were met with the utmost suspicion from Melvin. When he left his house to go to school, everyone who seemed even remotely unfamiliar got some none-too-subtle probing questions and, eventually, an outright accusation of alien tendencies.

It turns out that looking down your nose at everyone isn't very good for facial recognition, though, especially for someone of Melvin's stature. After a civil shouting match with the woman who'd driven the same bus for years got him kicked out, Melvin settled for leveling everyone he met with a cool, judgemental stare.

This wasn't nearly as intimidating coming from a tiny elementary schooler as he thought it was.

Eventually, he arrived at school, only 30 minutes early rather than the usual hour due to his bus mishap.

The day went by rather uneventfully, aside from one kid actually checking a book out from the library, something no sane human would ever do. It turned out that it was just a dare, though she still landed on Melvin's shortlist of suspects.

Then science rolled around.

After Professor P practically pulverized the school, Jerome Horwitz had gone through a series of temporary teachers. The latest one, Ms. Sultoh, had an especially impressive run of about three weeks. Her tactic was to give the students a different plant to dissect each day, from carnation blossoms to holly berries to corn rootstocks, and sit at her desk to silently watch them work. It was creepy, but it didn't involve supervillainy or detentions, so it worked out.

Melvin entered the room with an expression he thought to be pensive and accusatory, just in case the aliens felt like masquerading as one of the students in his class, and wondered what flora would be on the cutting block today. He found the dissections relaxing, if not all that intellectually stimulating. Or he would have, if he wasn't constantly being interrupted by-

"Hey, Melvin, are you okay?" interrupted Harold.

"Yeah, you look kind of like you need to go to the bathroom," George added.

"No. I'm fine," snapped Melvin, jolted out of his reverie.

"Are you sure? Because it seriously looked like any minute you were going to start-"

"Stop talking and go sit down before Ms. Sultoh gives you both another strike!" Melvin huffed and walked briskly to his desk.

Weird. Normally, there was a set of two dull dissection scalpels and tweezers at everyone's desks. The fact that he wouldn't be able to perform his usual checks on the equipment was just one more annoyance to add to the list.

Not less than a minute later, the teacher walked in. It wasn't Ms. Sultoh, with her calm demeanor, slight build, and near-infinite apathy. No, this teacher was bulky in the way a locomotive hurtling towards you at a million miles an hour was bulky. Her expression had all the seriousness of a drill sergeant and, somehow, even more of the impatience.

She wore thick protective gloves, and she pulled an almost comically large metal locker on a dolly into the room behind her. Behind that was Mr. Krupp, who eyed the locker with a healthy amount of caution.

"Children, this is Ms. Eprisent."

Melvin's hand shot up.

"She will be your new science teacher."

Melvin started waving his hand frantically.

"I'm warning you right now," Mr. Krupp said, staring directly at Harold and George. "If you drive her crazy, I will punish you severely." His words held little weight, as George and Harold were seasoned pranksters, so they knew how to pick their targets wisely. Ms. Eprisent was very obviously not a good target.

Melvin waved his hand so wildly that it seemed like it would come off and fly across the room.

"Ugh. Yes, Melvin," Mr. Krupp groaned.

"What happened to Ms. Sultoh?"

Ms. Eprisent replied for him. "She is unfortunately quite ill."

"She seemed to be in excellent health last week. Isn't that extremely suspicious?" Melvin asked.

Mr. Krupp opened his mouth to scold Melvin, but Ms. Eprisent cut him off. "There is nothing suspicious about it. It seems to me like you're just attempting to stall class from starting so that you can get out of work."

"No, I'm just-"

"Do you hate science? That is the impression I am getting from you right now."

"Of course not!"

"Then you will be quiet." She seemed to take Melvin's dumbstruck silence as agreement.

Mr. Krupp coughed awkwardly. "Well, it seems you have everything under control here. I'll just... show myself out." He glanced one more time at the locker.

Ms. Eprisent had shown him the contents, and it was full of various chemicals, doodads, and other bits that she assured him were not only perfectly legal but almost definitely safe.

Not having a science teacher was essentially grounds for shutting down the school, and every substitute teacher around avoided Harold and George like the plague, so he didn't really have a choice but to hire her after Ms. Sultoh's unfortunate situation. As he tore his eyes away from the metal container and left the room, he'd be lying if he said he didn't have misgivings about the new teacher.

Then again, he had misgivings about basically all of his staff, so it was probably fine.

In the classroom, Ms. Eprisent busied herself with positioning the locker so that the kids couldn't see inside it, then taking out some matches, along with several party balloons in various stages of flotation. She returned to the center of the room and faced the class. "Today, we will start our lessons on combustion."

Melvin's jaw practically hit the floor. "You're going to light those on fire?" he asked without raising his hand.

"Yes."

"In an elementary school classroom?"

"Yes."

"You can't do that."

"Why?"

"Because- because it's a safety violation, for one thing," he spluttered.

"Hm." Ms. Eprisent regarded him coolly. "I take it you think you have more intelligence than an average adolescent of your current growth stage."

"Uh, yeah, I obviously do."

"Delightful." The way she said the word made it sound more like she'd just told Melvin that he looked and smelled like the unholy spawn of a dead skunk and a dumpster. "What if I told you I had malonic acid, a divalent manganese complex, and iodine, and that I was willing to let you use them?" she said, nearly monotone.

"I'd ask what on Earth you were thinking bringing all that into a public school!" Ms. Eprisent waited, clearly unimpressed. "...Then I'd ask if you had sodium chloride so I could perform a Briggs–Rauscher reaction, and maybe some glass containers of different sizes to quantitatively examine the cyclic reaction patterns?" Melvin squeaked.

For the first time, Ms. Eprisent smiled. It was somehow even more frightening than her resting expression. "As a matter of fact, I do." She retrieved some battered jars and containers of various sizes from the locker, as well as a compact metal device a bit bigger than a breadbox. She unfolded five supporting bars from it and set it on a desk in the back of the room.

"Keep the chemicals under the fume hood. Do not bother your classmates." More than a little in shock, Melvin walked over to sit at the desk she'd prepared.

With that, Ms. Eprisent went back to the front of the class and moved the lighter towards one of the balloons. "I'd advise you all to cover your ears."

"Ms. Eprisent?" One of the girls in the second row raised her hand. "My mom says my hairspray is highly flammable. So, um, maybe I should stand in the back?"

If the teacher was annoyed at the interruption, she didn't show it. "Yes, of course. To have your pretty little head catch on fire would be... such a travesty." The girl nodded. "Stand in the back."

"Dude, do you think she's seriously gonna do it?" Harold whispered, not even glancing at the girl flouncing past his desk.

"There's no way. No teacher on Earth is that cool."

"Now cover your ears," called Ms. Eprisent.

"Just in case..." Harold clamped his hands to either side of his head.

"This is so sick!" whispered George.

"I can't hear you."

George shook his head and turned towards Ms. Eprisent, covering his ears just in time for her to ignite the balloon with a resounding BANG.

Several people shrieked, and the class's expressions of excitement turned into a near frenzy.

"What the heck!"

"Oh my god. Awesome!"

"That was just like the fireball in that one movie!"

Only Melvin stayed quiet, still dumbfounded.

Ms. Eprisent cleared her throat. "That balloon was filled with hydrogen. Now, children, how would you like to learn about stoichiometry?" she asked. The room instantly turned dead silent.

A gloved hand came up to her face as she sighed before addressing her students again. "Do you want to learn how to turn a balloon into a fireball more gooder?"

The class erupted with resounding cheers.

At his new desk, Melvin finally came to grips with his situation. Slowly, he retrieved the nitrile gloves and lab goggles he kept in his backpack in case of a chemical spill, toxic waste hazard, or especially caustic cafeteria food.

Melvin wasn't dumb - there was basically no way Ms. Eprisent wasn't an alien. He knew what a fume hood was supposed to look like, and this was not it. The metal had tiny channels in it that pulsed slightly, and the fan looked like something that belonged on a spacecraft.

Looking down at the spread of mostly exotic and almost definitely unsafe chemicals before him, though, he almost couldn't bring himself to care.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Argh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry! Unsurprisingly, supercomputers are hard to get a hang of, so I haven't had a ton of mental energy for writing lately. I can't really guarantee that'll change in the short term, but I'm committed to finishing this fic eventually! As always, if you leave a comment, I love you. See ya soon (hopefully)!

**Author's Note:**

> It Arrives! Man, I've spent the past few days generating trees in lab and watching the CU Netflix series, and I'm finally feeling good about where I'ma go with this story. Please leave a comment! Give me validation! I demand it!


End file.
